


Hallucinations

by jatpfan



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:08:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27036949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jatpfan/pseuds/jatpfan
Summary: After the Orpheum, Ray starts seeing things around the house. He's pretty sure he's losing his mind.
Relationships: Julie Molina/Luke Patterson
Comments: 46
Kudos: 763





	Hallucinations

The first time it happened was exactly four days after Julie and her band performed at the Orpheum. Ray, still riding the high of his daughter’s success, was singing along to their song while cooking the spaghetti, occasionally using the spoon as a makeshift microphone. Julie was in the garage, and Carlos was in his room doing homework, so he was taking fully advantage of the privacy of the moment.

“Whatever happens, even if I’m the last standing, Imma stand tall. Imma stand tall!” He sang to himself under his breath, swaying on his feet. He pulled the spaghetti off the stove and as he began to pour it into three separate bowls, he had to stop himself from grabbing a fourth.

He grabbed his phone and shot a quick text off to Julie that dinner was ready, since it was easier than walking out to the garage to fetch her, and then turned to call Carlos down from his room.

“Carlos! _Mijo_ , dinner’s ready!”

The clattering of feet alerted him that his son had heard his call, and he went to set the table.

Julie must have been waiting for his text, because she came in through the front door at the same moment that Carlos made it downstairs. He looked up to greet them, but his words fell on his lips.

Because for a split second, it looked like there were five kids standing in front of him rather than two. A shock of blonde hair caught his eye, even, and neither of his kids were blondes.

But then he blinked, and it was gone. It was just Julie and Carlos standing there, looking expectantly at him.

He cleared his throat.

“Who’s ready to eat?”

After all, it must have just been a trick of the light.

* * *

When a few days passed and nothing happened, Ray had convinced himself that it had just been his mind playing tricks on him. Of course, there hadn’t been other kids in his house. That was impossible.

He brushed it off and forgot about it.

And then he heard a voice while walking past his daughter’s room. A male voice.

“I’m telling you. If we switch verses two and three, it will flow into the chorus so much better. See, listen-“

His curiosity was piqued. A male voice discussing a song meant only one thing. One of Julie’s band mates must be on the phone with her. She must have them on speakerphone, or maybe she was video chatting them.

Whatever the case, Ray had yet to meet these boys, and he still wanted to thank them for dragging his daughter back into music.

He knocked on her door.

The voice fell silent as Ray swung the door open. Julie was sitting with her legs crossed on her bed, her notebook out in front of her. She smiled at him as he entered.

Her phone was on the other side of the room, charging.

“Oh,” he said, frowning. His eyes flicked around the room for her laptop, but it was shut, “I thought I heard someone in here.”

Something flashed across her face, but then she simply shook her head.

“No, just me in here.”

But that voice had been so _clear_. Too clear for a phone, really, but then again, technology was improving at such a rapid pace that he wouldn’t put it past it. But Julie wasn’t on the phone.

His eyebrows furrowed. He took a few steps back towards her closet, suspicious, and yanked it open. He stuck his head in, searching for random teenage boys that his daughter might be hiding.

“Dad!”

“Sorry. Sorry. I just…” he trailed off and forced himself to take a deep breath. Okay, there wasn’t a boy in his daughter’s room. She wasn’t on the phone. That definitely wasn’t her voice speaking.

He turned back to look at her. There was concern and a little bit of alarm in her eyes.

“Never mind,” he shrugged it off, “I think I’m going to go to bed early. Have you gotten all your homework done?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I finished it an hour ago.”

“Good, good. I’ll leave you to your songwriting, then,” he said.

He backed out of the room, blinking several times, and left.

Okay, he was hearing things. That was fine. It was just one time. It wasn’t like he was going crazy or anything.

* * *

It wasn’t one time. The very next day, he could have sworn he heard someone call Julie’s name, and a few days after that, he walked into the living room and nearly screamed at the sight of a teenage boy with jet black hair and pale skin laying on his couch, there one moment and gone the next. And then there was the floating objects. It was always in the corner of his eye, like the time he dropped his pen and couldn’t find it and then, right in his peripheral, he saw it float back onto the desk. Or the time Julie’s hat got knocked off her head as if by a sudden gust of wind, but nothing was there, and all the windows were closed, and she had turned around and glared at something that wasn’t there.

It was official. Ray Molina had lost his mind. There was no other explanation.

Still, he wasn’t about to let his kids know that.

* * *

It was a week and a half after Julie’s performance at the Orpheum that he realized what these hallucinations looked like. He came down to the kitchen in the middle of the night to get some water and caught sight of one of them sitting at the table. It was the brunette one. The one that sang with his daughter and played the guitar and obviously had a crush (it was obvious just sitting in the audience and watching them play). He was sitting at his dinner table, fingers tapping along the wood absent-mindedly. He didn’t even look up when Ray entered.

The hallucination stayed for a total of three seconds for vanishing. The longest time yet. Long enough for him to recognize the boy.

He stared at the spot the boy had resided in for another minute, blinking, before tearing his eyes from it.

Okay. He was hallucinating his daughter’s bandmates. Why, he wasn’t sure, but he was not about to let it get to him.

No. He had to be strong for Julie and Carlos. He wasn’t about to let them deal with a dad with hallucinations on top of dealing with their grief over their mother. He could handle this, after all. It wasn’t like seeing these boys around the house was scary. Just… a little alarming.

* * *

The hallucinations continued, and they got worse. Occasionally, when driving Julie and Carlos to or from school, he would see another teenage boy in the backseat with them. Sometimes, he would walk into the garage and see a blonde boy twirling a drumstick, or a brunette kicked back on the couch and writing in a notebook. He had even watched them phase through the walls a few times, sometimes saying a few things to Julie, who never answered.

But sometimes it looked like she could see them, too.

And then Ray got sick.

It wasn’t anything bad, just a nasty cold, but it was enough to knock him out of commission for a few days. He mostly stayed confined to his room, unwilling to get Julie or Carlos sick, too. The hallucinations didn’t bother him in his room.

Until they did.

He was drifting in and out of sleep when he heard it.

“Hey-o, Ray. Just coming in to check up on you. Man, you look awful.”

He blinked his eyes blearily open and found himself staring at the pale face of the bassist in his daughter’s band peering over him.

“Really not looking too hot,” the boy said, “Would you be freaked out if I brought you a bowl of soup? Yeah, you probably would be. Maybe I’ll ask Julie to.”

Don’t respond to the hallucinations. Don’t respond to the hallucinations.

He shut his eyes and pretended like it wasn’t there. He didn’t hear him again.

But he did feel his blanket pull up to his shoulders.

(An hour later, Julie entered his room with some soup. He convinced himself it was a coincidence.)

* * *

Three weeks after Julie’s performance at the Orpheum, the hallucinations were coming full force. Whenever he saw Julie, at least one hallucination was near her, and dinner time always meant that there was an extra three sitting at the table, talking to each other while Ray talked to Julie and Carlos.

He learned their names. He learned that, for some reason, Reggie’s hallucination tended to hang out more with him. Luke’s tended to hang out more around Julie. Alex wasn’t there as often, but he caught sight of him occasionally around the house, hanging out with another one of the boys, and he was always at dinner.

Ray found himself walking around the boys when he passed, but he refused to look right at them. He didn’t want to acknowledge the delusions.

Even when they talked directly to him.

Until he wasn’t.

“Alright, Julie. I know you’ve got a big gig tonight, but tomorrow’s a school night, so no staying after to party,” Ray said as he pulled his jacket on, Julia, Carlos, and the hallucinations in tow, “Remember: School comes first.”

“Aw, come on, Ray,” Reggie whine. He had an arm flung around Julie’s shoulder, but she wasn’t reacting to it, “The parties are always so much fun after gigs!”

“I said, school comes first,” he said sternly, and his eyes met Reggie’s briefly.

He paled as he realized that he had just spoken to a hallucination, in front of his kids no less, and he quickly drew his eyes back to the door and went to open it.

“Dad…” Carlos hesitated, frowning at him, “We didn’t say anything.”

The hallucinations were deathly silent for once. So was Julie. Ray cleared his throat and turned back to them.

“Yeah, you didn’t. Sorry. Just… chimed in a little too early.”

The boys were staring at each other, wide-eyed. He could see Reggie mouthing something to Luke, and Alex looked impossibly pale and startled. Julie’s eyes were as wide as saucers.

Well. This wasn’t good.

“Can he hear us?” Alex whispered frantically, “Can he… Can he _see_ us?”

“No, of course he can’t!” Luke said, “Only Julie can. Remember?”

“It sure looked like he could see us,” Reggie added.

“Dad?” Julie spoke, voice wary and nervous, but also hopeful. The tone surprised Ray, and he drew his gaze to her, “Dad, can you see them?”

What?

His eyebrows furrowed, then shot up, and he saw Luke grasp Julie’s hand.

“The… the band?” he said, very slowly, sure that his kids would be quick to point out his decline of sanity.

She nodded, suddenly frantic.

“You can see them!” she said, “The boys.”

“Uh…” he trailed off, unsure of where she was going with this, or what this even meant, “I think I’m hallucinating.”

And there it was. His big secret that he had been hiding all these weeks.

She shook her head, and suddenly her arms were flying around him, holding him close.

“No, they’re not hallucinations, dad. They’re real. They’re ghosts.”

“I’m sorry. What?”

Needless to say, they were a little late to their gig that night.

* * *

It took Ray approximately three days to truly come to terms with what his daughter told him that night. Her three bandmates were not holograms. They were ghosts, and the ghosts lived in their house, and they had died twenty-five years ago after eating bad hotdogs, and they had nearly been destroyed by another ghost, and somehow his daughter had saved them, resulting in them becoming more solid and, apparently, visible to Ray.

“I don’t understand this,” he said three days after the conversation, standing in the kitchen where the three teenagers were lounging, looking at him nervously, “but my house is always open to kids who need a place to stay. Even ghost kids.”

(Later that day, he went out and bought three new chairs for their dinner table. It was a crammed fit, but the look on the boys’ faces when they all sat around the dinner table was worth it.)


End file.
